Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, issued a statement yesterday defending Father Benedict Groeschel, who earlier this week blamed child victims of pedophile priests for their rapes. Calling Groeschel’s service “heroic,” and his record “impressive,” Donohue claims Father Groeschel merely “hypothesized how
a young person (14, 16 or 18, as he put it) could conceivably take
advantage of a priest who was having a nervous breakdown.”
Groeschel told the National Catholic Register that in a “lot of the cases, the youngster — 14, 16, 18 — is the seducer.”

Donohue calls Groeschel’s record of screening applicants to the priesthood “impressive,” yet, as The New Civil Rights Movement
posited yesterday, perhaps someone in the past 40 years should have
realized that the gatekeeper was a sympathizer to rapists of children?
Did no one ever examine Groeschel’s batting average?

The Catholic
Church has been plagued with thousands of pedophile priests, enabled by
Catholic leadership up to and including Pope Benedict XVI, (certainly in
his previously role,) and men like Donohue, who attack groups like SNAP and demean and discredit those victims who speak out.

Speaking
of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abuse By Priests — whom Dolan
has called a “phony victims’ group” — David Clohessy, SNAP’s Executive
Director, writes of the Groeschel issue
that “the real issue isn’t that Groeschel makes such hurtful, stupid
and Todd Akin-like remarks.(Many Catholic officials have thought and
said much the same. We suspect many still do right now.)”

In a recent interview with the National Catholic Register, Father Benedict Groeschel, of the conservative Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, said that teens act as seducers in some sexual abuse cases involving priests.

In light of this, the recent comments by Groeschel seem both puzzling and jarringly out of step with current sentiments.

In an interview with the National Catholic Register
posted this week, Groeschel was asked about his work with the very
conservative Friars of the Renewal, a breakaway order he founded 25
years ago. The conversation took an interesting turn, however, when the
editor asked about the 78-year-old's work with sexual abuse
perpetrators.

From The Villager:http://www.thevillager.com/?p=7172BY LINCOLN ANDERSON August 30, 2012
Shulamith Firestone, a pioneering feminist who shot to fame at age 25
with her best-selling book, “The Dialectic of Sex,” was found dead in
her East Village apartment on Tuesday. She was 67.

Alerted by
neighbors, who had smelled a strong odor from her apartment, her
superintendent peered in through a window from the fire escape and saw
her body on the floor. Her landlord, Bob Perl, said she had probably
been dead about a week. He said her one-bedroom unit included rows of
books, including Greek classics.

Suffering from mental illness,
she had shut herself off from contact with other people. Perl said the
cause of death is unclear at this point — police said it wasn’t
starvation — and that the coroner’s report should provide an answer.

Perl
purchased the building, 213 E. 10th St., in 1993, and figures Firestone
lived there, on the fifth floor, for about 30 years.

“She was not
well for many years,” Perl said, noting that her family members and
“strangers” would pay her rent when she was unable to. “She was a
prodigy. But she had been ill for so many years, she lost contact with
the outside world.”

How
the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an
epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs – and stuck others with the bill

he
great criticism of Mitt Romney, from both sides of the aisle, has
always been that he doesn't stand for anything. He's a flip-flopper,
they say, a lightweight, a cardboard opportunist who'll say anything to
get elected.

The critics couldn't be more wrong. Mitt Romney is no
tissue-paper man. He's closer to being a revolutionary, a
backward-world version of Che or Trotsky, with tweezed nostrils instead
of a beard, a half-Windsor instead of a leather jerkin. His legendary
flip-flops aren't the lies of a bumbling opportunist – they're the
confident prevarications of a man untroubled by misleading the
nonbeliever in pursuit of a single, all-consuming goal. Romney has a
vision, and he's trying for something big: We've just been too slow to
sort out what it is, just as we've been slow to grasp the roots of the
radical economic changes that have swept the country in the last
generation.

The incredible untold story of the 2012 election so
far is that Romney's run has been a shimmering pearl of perfect
political hypocrisy, which he's somehow managed to keep hidden, even
with thousands of cameras following his every move. And the drama of
this rhetorical high-wire act was ratcheted up even further when Romney
chose his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin – like himself, a
self-righteously anal, thin-lipped, Whitest Kids U Know penny pincher
who'd be honored to tell Oliver Twist there's no more soup left. By
selecting Ryan, Romney, the hard-charging, chameleonic champion of a
disgraced-yet-defiant Wall Street, officially succeeded in moving the
battle lines in the 2012 presidential race.

Like John McCain four
years before, Romney desperately needed a vice-presidential pick that
would change the game. But where McCain bet on a combustive mix of
clueless novelty and suburban sexual tension named Sarah Palin, Romney
bet on an idea. He said as much when he unveiled his choice of Ryan, the
author of a hair-raising budget-cutting plan best known for its
willingness to slash the sacred cows of Medicare and Medicaid. "Paul
Ryan has become an intellectual leader of the Republican Party," Romney
told frenzied Republican supporters in Norfolk, Virginia, standing
before the reliably jingoistic backdrop of a floating warship. "He
understands the fiscal challenges facing America: our exploding deficits
and crushing debt."

Sen.
Bernie Sanders is praising President Obama’s support for his
constitutional amendment and movement to overturn Citizens United.

Yesterday,
during a Reddit chat, Obama announced his support for Sen. Sanders’
efforts to overturn Citizens United, “Money has always been a factor in
politics, but we are seeing something new in the no-holds barred flow of
seven and eight figure checks, most undisclosed, into super-PACs; they
fundamentally threaten to overwhelm the political process over the long
run and drown out the voices of ordinary citizens. We need to start with
passing the Disclose Act that is already written and been sponsored in
Congress – to at least force disclosure of who is giving to who. We
should also pass legislation prohibiting the bundling of campaign
contributions from lobbyists. Over the longer term, I think we need to
seriously consider mobilizing a constitutional amendment process to
overturn Citizens United (assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t revisit
it). Even if the amendment process falls short, it can shine a spotlight
of the super-PAC phenomenon and help apply pressure for change.”

Sen.
Sanders responded to Obama in a statement, “I applaud President Obama
for expressing support for a serious effort to restore the democratic
foundations of our country that are under severe attack as a result of
the disastrous Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United.”

Let’s be
honest, President Obama isn’t going to sway the electorate by supporting
the movement to overturn Citizens United. The truth is that most
Americans still don’t understand Citizens United and the impact that it
is having on both our electoral system and our government. The Sanders
led campaign to get rid of Citizens United is currently just as much
about education as it is policy change.

The
crazy train, built by the religious right and accelerated by the Tea
Party, must stop before it goes off the rails and inflicts severe damage
on America. It is unclear what the ultimate aims of these extremists
truly are or where they ultimately want to take this country, but it is
increasingly clear that people like Rep. Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin
have a markedly different vision of this nation than the rest of us. As
their rhetoric grows more reckless, the fundamentalism more inflexible,
the "facts" more fantastical, the threats more menacing, the politics
more petulant, and the demands increasingly dictatorial, one has to
wonder where this precarious road leads.

The right's incoherent
hatred of its caricature of government mixes uneasily with its worship
of weapons that have virtually nothing to do with hunting or helping
protect families from intruders. Their unfounded attacks on America's
foundations are as offensive as their stockpile of weapons appears to be
offensive. We used to call such efforts sedition, but now they are
simply an audition for some GOP and Tea Party candidates. For example, a
Lubbock County, Texas, judge, Tom Head, made an appearance on a local
television show in which he offered a wild, anti-UN conspiracy theory and suggested rebelling against President Barack Obama and assassinating him. According to The New York Times:

"[Obama]
is going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to
the U.N.," Mr. Head said on Fox 34 last week. "O.K., what's going to
happen when that happens? I'm thinking worst-case scenario: civil
unrest, civil disobedience, civil war, maybe. And we're not talking just
a few riots here and demonstrations. We're talking Lexington, Concord,
take up arms and get rid of the guy."

And if the president did
send in United Nations troops, Mr. Head continued, "I don't want 'em in
Lubbock County. O.K. So I'm going to stand in front of their armored
personnel carriers and say, 'You're not coming in here.' And the
sheriff, I've already asked him. I said, 'You gonna back me?' He said,
'Yeah, I'll back you.'

Well, I don't want a bunch of rookies
back there," Mr. Head said. "I want trained, equipped, seasoned veteran
officers to back me."

TAMPA,
Fla.—Four hardy souls from rural Illinois joined tens of thousands of
people undeterred by threats of Hurricane Isaac during this week’s
Republican National Convention. They weren’t among the almost 2,400
delegates to the convention, though, nor were they from the press corps,
said to number 15,000. They weren’t part of the massive police force
assembled here, more than 3,000 strong, all paid for with $50 million of
U.S. taxpayer money. These four were about to join a much larger group:
the more than 2.4 million people in the past decade whose U.S. jobs
have been shipped to China. In their case, the company laying them off
and sending their jobs overseas is Bain Capital, co-founded by the
Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney.

We met the group at
Romneyville, a tent city on the outskirts of downtown Tampa, established
by the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign in the spirit of
the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression. A couple hundred people
gathered before the makeshift stage to hear speakers and musicians,
under intermittent downpours and the noise of three police helicopters
drowning out the voices of the anti-poverty activists. Scores of police
on bicycles occupied the surrounding streets.

Cheryl Randecker was
one of those four we met at Romneyville whose Bain jobs are among the
170 slated to be off-shored. They build transmission sensors for many
cars and trucks made in the United States. Cheryl was sent to China to
train workers there, not knowing that the company was about to be sold
and the jobs she was training people for included her own. I asked her
how it felt to be training her own replacements after working at the
same company for 33 years:

“Knowing that you’re going to be
completely out of a job and there’s no hope for any job in our area, it
was gut-wrenching, because you don’t know where the next point is going
to be. I’m 52 years old. What are we going to do? To start over at this
point in my life is extremely scary.”

Cheryl and her co-workers
learned that the Honeywell division they had been working for had been
sold to Sensata Technologies. They researched Sensata. “We found out
this summer that it was owned by Bain [Capital],“she said. “Then we
found the connection between Bain and Governor Romney. And that just
spurred a little bit of emotion ... we wanted to stand up and fight back
and take a stand for the American people and for our jobs.”

After losing his job at the National Review, John Derbyshire has found a new home at the White Nationalist website VDARE where he can evenmoreopenly spew vitriol at minorities, as he did yesterday in his column
comparing the situation of African Americans in the U.S. to the Roma,
better known as gypsies, of Europe. “In both cases you have a big
racial-ethnic bloc of people who are, for whatever reason—discuss among
yourselves—radically ill-fitted for life in bourgeois society,”
Derbyshire writes. “In both cases, actual bourgeois citizens opt for
ethnic disaggregation: for the gypsies to be moved on, for separation by
white flight from the underclass blacks. National authorities respond
appropriately, with expulsion and incarceration.”With views like these, it makes you wonder why National Review took so long to fire him.

The
thing I find myself wondering is: are these truly, as I said back then,
different kinds of problem—underclass blacks in America, gypsies in
Europe?

In both cases you have a big racial-ethnic bloc of
people who are, for whatever reason—discuss among yourselves—radically
ill-fitted for life in bourgeois society.

…

In both
cases, well-intentioned Left activists—under the banner of Civil Rights
in the U.S.A., Human Rights in Europe—propose social-engineering
solutions that would cost scads of public money, even as all our public
money is vanishing into chasms of debt. Many of the proposed solutions
have already been tried; all of them rest on implausible assumptions
about human nature.

The best that either bloc has come up with
on its own is the absurd-yet-sinister crackpot mock-militarism of the
Nation of Islam.

In both cases, actual bourgeois citizens opt
for ethnic disaggregation: for the gypsies to be moved on, for
separation by white flight from the underclass blacks. National
authorities respond appropriately, with expulsion and incarceration.

From Common Dreams:http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/08/30-12by Bill Moyers and Bernard WeisbergerPublished on Thursday, August 30, 2012 by Common DreamsWe
might wish the uproar from the convention halls of both parties these
busy weeks were the wholesome clamor of delegates deliberating serious
visions of how we should be governed for the next four years. It rises
instead from scripted TV spectacles — grown-ups doing somersaults of
make-believe — that will once again distract the public’s attention from
the death rattle of American democracy brought on by an overdose of
campaign cash.

No serious proposal to take the money out of
politics, or even reduce its tightening grip on the body politic, will
emerge from Tampa or Charlotte, so the sounds of celebration and
merriment are merely prelude to a funeral cortege for America as a
shared experience. A radical minority of the super-rich has gained
ascendency over politics, buying the policies, laws, tax breaks,
subsidies, and rules that consolidate a permanent state of vast
inequality by which they can further help themselves to America’s wealth
and resources.

Their appetite for more is insatiable. As we
write, Mitt Romney, after two fundraisers in which he raised nearly $10
million from the oil and gas industry, and having duly consulted with
the Oklahoma billionaire energy executive who chairs the campaign’s
energy advisory committee, has announced that if elected President, he
will end a century of federal control over oil and gas drilling on
public lands, leaving such matters to local officials more attuned to
industry desires. Theodore Roosevelt, the first great advocate for
public lands in the White House, would be rolling in his grave, if Dick
Cheney hadn’t already dumped his bones in a Wyoming mining shaft during
the first hours of the Bush-Halliburton administration.

We are
nearing the culmination of a cunning and fanatical drive to dismantle
the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the
intellectual and cultural frameworks that were slowly and painstakingly
built over decades to protect everyday citizens from the excesses of
private power. The “city on the hill” has become a fortress of
privilege, guarded by a hired political class and safely separated from
the economic pressures that are upending the household stability, family
dynamics, social mobility, and civic life of everyday Americans.

One
of the reasons this Republican convention has been so deathly dull is
that the real action isn't at the convention. It's at Cracker Bay.
That's the name of the yacht where the Romney team just hosted 50
partiers, including some of his top donors. This was one of about a
dozen events outside of the convention where they had private meetings
with donors giving more than $1 million dollars to his campaign. Over $1
million a piece. Now, where do you think the real policy gets made?

You
think Mitt Romney gives a damn what a delegate thinks? The only
delegates that matter were on that yacht. They call this group the
"Victory Council." This is made of people who are literally millionaires
and billionaires and who dictate what Mitt Romney's positions will be.
He's a legendary flip-flopper, but if you want to know what he really
thinks you had to be on that boat.

"It was a really nice event. These are good supporters," said billionaire Wilbur Ross, an energy industry executive, according to ABC News.
I bet it was. Mitt Romney just revealed his energy plan a couple of
days ago. Are you going to be surprised to find out that it massively
helps energy companies? A really nice event is where you pay a million
bucks and you get billions back if the candidate you supported wins the
presidency.

It's clear what Mitt Romney owes these people. What do
you think he owes you? Ann Romney said that Mitt was a man who would
not fail. She's right; he will not fail his donors. He is a good
businessman, so he will give them the service they paid for.

They're
so brazen the boat they were meeting on was flying a Cayman Islands
flag. As one local put it, even their yacht doesn't want to pay taxes.
In the old days, you'd be a little embarrassed about things like this
and it would be huge news if you got caught. Now people treat it like
it's perfectly normal.

Paul Ryan recently went to get the blessing
of billionaire GOP donor Sheldon Adelson. Soon after he was picked and
before getting ready for their convention, he had to stop everything and
kiss the ring of their boss. This is sick. It is obvious legalized
bribery and it's being done right in front of our eyes. And the press
hardly notices as our democracy leaves shore along with that boat full
of millionaires.

Thursday, August 30, 2012

History repeats itself; the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. —Karl Marx TAMPA, Fla.—The real truth in America is hard to come by these days; even the Paul Ryan Wikipedia entry has been whitewashed, omitting that he was voted the biggest brown-noser in his high school class.

As
I do not believe, in contrast to most of the press corps here, that
Orwellian double-speak is the highest form of human communication, I
cannot attend a political convention and not feel the anxiety of Hunter
S. Thompson’s influence. However much respect books like “The Making of
the President” series merit, it’s the bourbon and crank-fueled honesty
of “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72” that truly captures the
zombie-like soullessness of the political lapdog class.

What to make of the 2012 Republican model?

It
didn’t take long to realize this convention was dominated by the same
country club set that’s been running this party for decades. Fears that
some new monstrous tea party/Christian fundamentalist hybrid has seized
the GOP’s helm were readily dispelled as the first busloads of
late-night partyers arrived in downtown Tampa on Monday night. Anyone
anticipating rabid creationists from the Wichita PTA was confronted with
the bland secularism of Laura Ashley and Brooks Brothers.

I
explained to one woman in her early 30s that she was the first
Republican I’d spoken to this week. She laughed and asked me where I was
from. Los Angeles, I told her, then followed up: “Do you really support
all the platforms in your party—about women, family and all of that?”
She replied, “The Republican Party is pro-business; I’m a
businesswoman.”

Recent
trends in poverty rates should have the country furious at its leaders.
When we get the data for 2011 next month, we are likely to see yet
another uptick in poverty rates, reversing almost 50 years of economic
progress. The percentage of people in extreme poverty, with incomes less
than half of the poverty level, is likely to again hit an all-time high
since the data has been collected.

The situation is made even
worse by the fact that so many of those in poverty are children. In
2010, 27 percent of all children in the country were reported as living
below the poverty level. For African-American children, the share in
poverty is approaching 40 percent.

Many will blame the welfare
reform law in 1996 that passed with bipartisan support. That is
appropriate. This bill involved a great deal of political grandstanding
and removed guarantees that could have protected millions of families in
a severe downturn like what we are now seeing.

Advocates of this
bill who now profess surprise at the result need to turn to a new line
of work. There were plenty of people at the time who warned that the
lack of federal guarantees could lead to severe hardship in an economic
downturn. No one has a right to be surprised on this one. The surge in
the poverty rate in a downturn like the present one was a predictable
and predicted outcome of the legislation.

However, there is the
other side of the story, the overall state of the economy, which is the
more important cause of the increase in the poverty rate. The vast
majority of the people in this country rely on work for the bulk of
their income and that would also be true for the tens of millions of
people in poverty, if work was available. These people cannot find jobs
in today's economy, or at least not full-time jobs that pay anything
close to a living wage.

Anti-abortion activists in Colorado have failed to place a proposed “fetal personhood” amendment on the state’s 2012 ballot.

Personhood
Colorado announced earlier this month that it collected 112,121
signatures for the ballot initiative. But the Secretary of State said
the group only submitted 106,119 signatures. Based on a random sample,
the Secretary of State projected that only roughly 85,800 of those
signatures are valid, falling short of the 86,105 valid signatures
needed to qualify of the ballot.

“Because the percentage of
presumed valid signatures falls between 90 percent and 110 percent of
the 86,105 valid signatures needed, the office is required to perform a
line-by-line analysis of every signature submitted,” the Secretary of
State explained in a press release.

TAMPA, Fla. — Twenty years ago, Patrick J. Buchanan
rocked the Republican convention in Houston by declaring there was a
“cultural war” taking place for the soul of America, denouncing the
Democratic Party as one that supported abortion, radical feminism and
the “homosexual rights movement.”

“The agenda Clinton and Clinton
would impose on America — abortion on demand, a litmus test for the
Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious
schools, women in combat — that’s change, all right,” said Mr. Buchanan,
a conservative commentator who was a rival to President George Bush in
the 1992 campaign. “But it is not the kind of change America wants.”

The
speech — along with similarly sharp-edged addresses by the evangelist
Pat Robertson and Marilyn Quayle, the wife of Vice President Dan Quayle —
pushed issues like abortion, gay rights, religion and the role of women
in society to the front of the stage, often loudly. Supporters of Mr.
Bush pointed to the tone of the convention as one of the reasons he lost
the election that November to Bill Clinton.

Yet Republicans gathered here to nominate Mitt Romney suggest that those speeches would hardly give them pause today. What many viewed as the fringes of the Republican Party
20 years ago have moved closer to the mainstream — evidence, Mr.
Buchanan said, of the extent to which a Republican establishment that
was once relatively moderate on social issues has been pushed rightward
by grass-roots conservatives.

From Common Dreams:http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/08/29-3by Bernie SandersPublished on Wednesday, August 29, 2012 by Common DreamsMitt
Romney, Paul Ryan and the Republican Party are now mounting a massive
attack against Social Security and other programs. Using "deficit
reduction" as their rationale, they are attempting to dismantle every
major piece of legislation passed since the 1930s that provides support
and security to working families.

They are being aided by at least
23 billionaire families, led by the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson,
who are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in this campaign as a
result of the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision. Despite
paying the lowest effective tax rate in decades, the billionaires want
more tax breaks for the very rich. Despite the fact that the elimination
of strong regulations caused the Wall Street meltdown and a terrible
recession, the billionaires want more deregulation. Despite outsourcing
of millions of good-paying American jobs to China and other low-wage
countries, the billionaires want more unfettered free trade.

At
this pivotal moment in American history, it's important to note how we
got into this deficit crisis, who was responsible and what is the
fairest way to address it.

Let us never forget that when Bill Clinton left office in 2001, this country enjoyed a healthy $236 billion SURPLUS.

Under
George W. Bush and his fellow "deficit hawks," we went to war in
Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush and Congress "forgot" to pay for those wars
that will end up adding some $3 trillion to our national debt. Where
were Paul Ryan and the other "deficit hawks" when we spent trillions on
wars and added to the deficit? They voted for those policies.

Under
George W. Bush and his fellow "deficit hawks," we gave huge tax breaks
to the wealthiest people in this country, which cost $1 trillion over a
decade. Where were Paul Ryan and the other "deficit hawks" when Bush and
Congress spent a trillion dollars on tax breaks for the very rich and
added to our national debt? They voted for those policies.

As
the mainstream press frets that the much-touted "economic-recovery"
appears to have lost steam, the economic crisis continues to escalate
for ordinary people.

With official unemployment holding steady at
9.5 percent (real unemployment is much higher), and with the state
budget cuts producing yet more tuition increases, a growing phenomenon
is sweeping the nation: homeless and hungry college students.

National
Public Radio (NPR) reported in late July: "For many college students
and their families, rising tuition costs and a tough economy are
presenting new challenges as college bills come in. This has led to a
little-known but growing population of financially stressed students,
who are facing hunger and sometimes even homelessness."

While no
exact figures are available, the National Association for the Education
of Homeless Children and Youth reports a large increase in homeless
students.

"We're hearing from the college presidents and
leadership that more and more students are struggling," Michelle Asha
Cooper of the Institute for Higher Education told reporters. "Some are
taking out pretty large amounts of student loans to finance their
education as well as their living costs. Some are enrolling part time,
some are even dropping out."

The University of California at Los
Angeles (UCLA) even created an "Economic Crisis Response Team" to help
homeless and hungry students stay enrolled. NPR reported the story of
one such UCLA student, Diego Sepulveda, who ended up homeless after
losing his full-time job at Subway. Now Sepulveda alternates between
sleeping in the library, student center and friend's couches, catching
occasional showers in a school gym.

From Truth Out:http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/11204-paul-ryan-and-the-gops-new-dog-whistle-politicsBy Joan WalshWednesday, 29 August 2012I
have a problem with liberals who dismiss the white working class as
hopelessly Republican and racist, because they ignore something
interesting: in 2008, our first black president got a higher share of
their votes than any recent white Democrat in this generation, including
John Kerry, Al Gore, and even Bill Clinton. A New York Times
analysis found that Obama won 46 percent of whites without a college
degree who earned between $30,000 and $75,000 a year, to Bill Clinton's
44 percent. He kept John McCain's edge with that group to 6 points, when
George W. Bush won them by 35 points against John Kerry four years
earlier. And in some swing states, such as Ohio, the "Obama coalition"
ultimately included the white working class.

Yes, many of those
voters raced back into the Republican column in 2010, when the GOP ran
up a 30-point edge in midterm congressional races, and for much of 2011,
Democrats talked about a strategy to keep the White House without
winning Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, key swing states he took in
2008. But I'm not sure why we'd conclude that those voters' problem was
mainly racial, or that they had run back to the GOP for good. Had they
shaken off their racism in 2008, only to have it return like a stubborn
virus in 2010?

Did the president become more black? What if their
reaction derived from frustration with Democratic leaders who hadn't
pursued an economic turnaround agenda aggressively enough, at a time
when unemployment stood at more than 10 percent—and almost 15 percent
for whites without a college degree?The GOP's new dog-whistle
politics, trashing white people in coded language once reserved for
blacks, opens new opportunities for Democrats—if they can help those
white people translate the new GOP rhetoric. In a 2012 debate,
then-front-runner Rick Santorum approvingly quoted from Charles Murray's
Coming Apart, hoping his listeners wouldn't know that this time Murray
was scolding white people. After Georgetown University student Sandra
Fluke supported President Obama's insurance regulations mandating
cost-free contraception, conservatives began trashing the young white
law student as a "welfare queen" wanting birth control on the taxpayers'
dime.

But "dependent voters" aren't just a problem to the GOP
because they eat up our tax dollars. "Republican supporters will
continue to decrease every year as more Americans become dependent on
the government," Tea Party Senator Jim DeMint wrote in his shrill 2012
book Now or Never. "Dependent voters will naturally elect even
big-government progressives who will continue to smother economic growth
and spend America deeper into debt. The 2012 election may be the last
opportunity for Republicans." Wisconsin conservative representative Paul
Ryan, he of the "Ryan Plan" to abolish Medicare, divides the electorate
into "makers" and "takers."

TAMPA,
Fla. -- Republicans emphatically approved a toughly worded party
platform at their national convention Tuesday that would ban all
abortions and gay marriages, reshape Medicare into a voucher-like
program and cut taxes to energize the economy and create jobs.

The
document opens by warning that while the American Dream has long been
of equal opportunity for everyone, "Today that American Dream is at
risk." It pledges that the GOP will "begin anew, with profound changes
in the way government operates; the way it budgets, taxes and
regulates."

Both parties routinely approve platforms at their
conventions every four years, meant to encapsulate their principles and
goals. Much of their details are customarily ignored when it comes to
actually governing.

Even so, a poll by the nonpartisan Pew
Research Center found more people interested in the GOP platform than in
the upcoming acceptance speeches by presidential candidate Mitt Romney
and his running mate, Paul Ryan. The survey found that 52 percent said
they were interested in learning about the Republican platform, compared
to 44 percent interested in Romney's speech and 46 percent interested
in Ryan's.

Politics
is an elaborate chess match, and in St, Petersburg one small strike was
staged against the Republican National convention on Aug. 26 that
revealed the thrust of President Obama’s 2012 re-election strategy.

As
panicky Republicans cancelled the first day of the convention on Monday
because of Tropical Storm Isaac, the focus on Sunday was the “RNC
Welcome Event” at Tropicana Field. These days no major convention event
is complete without a counter-protest, and in downtown St. Petersburg
nearly 500 people gathered Sunday to march to the sports stadium and
voice their displeasure at what they derided as “the world’s largest cocktail party .”

Given the spitting rain and gusts, the turnout was better than expected. And given the months of police and presshype that
a mob of mayhem-wreaking anarchists would crash the RNC, the protest
rally around Mirror Lake seemed more like a festive Sunday in the park.

A couple of hundred people milled about as Dave Rovics belted out crowd pleasers like “ I’m a Better Anarchist than You .”
A handful of buses pulled up and disgorged more protesters who came
from far away as Miami, New York city and Wisconsin. The rally and
protest was organized by the Florida Consumer Action Network , a local grassroots organization focused on public policy issues.

Few
anarchists were in evidence, apart from a scrum of fidgety black-clad
youth who melted into the rally after drawing stares. It felt like an
Occupy-related event with a giant puppet of Romney tagged with a “King
of the 1%,” and chants of “We are the 99%.”

"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." Denis Diderot

Former
House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) might not have the role he initially
wanted at the Republican National Convention — that of nominee — but
he’s nonetheless using his time wisely. With the help of the RNC, he’s launching Newt U, an apparently ongoing effort in partnership with the Washington Post
Company’s for-profit education arm, Kaplan. At the end of the second
session of Newt U on August 28, 2012, he explained more about the
thinking behind the his and Kaplan’s efforts.

“There are three key
intellectual arguments that we have to get much better at making, and
this is part of the reason that we are creating the whole concept of a
Newt University and developing our site at newtuniversity.com, because
we think these kind of arguments our own activists, our own volunteers,
and next generation need, because the schools are so far to the left we
have to create online capability to sort of counter the false
information, the false ideologies,” he told the crowd.

Among the
“false information” and “false ideologies” Newt U intends to arm its
students to counter is the supposed idea that public service is noble
and the personal acquisition of money is not.

“We need to
reassert,” he said, “the nobility of creating jobs and wealth.” Though
it was Gingrich whose supporters, during the primary campaign, released a long-form ad attacking current nominee Mitt Romney’s (R-MA) method of wealth creation later defended by Gingrich,
he told today’s crowd: “If you listen to people like Obama, there’s
this contempt that sort of says you know, ‘If you go into public service
and you end up as a good bureaucrat, that’s really noble,’ but if
you’re to take the same skill level and go out here and just create
wealth, it’s ‘That’s really not noble, that’s somehow beneath us.’”

During
a recent interview on the Today Show, Jim Bob Duggar blurted out, "It's
fun trying!" when asked if he and Michelle were actively seeking to
have another baby. Today's host, Savannah Guthrie responded to the
mega-dad's salacious remark with, "Jim Bob - you sly dog!"

But a quick look beneath the surface reveals that America's most celebrated Quiverfull couple believe and espouse decidedly unhealthy ideas when it comes to sex and babymaking.

Although
Jim Bob makes frequent displays of romantic affection toward his
prolific wife, Michelle, which would suggest that the couple might enjoy
sex for non-procreative purposes, the "biblical family values"
advocates-- whose "literal" interpretations of scripture inspire the
Duggars to receive each and every pregnancy as an unmitigated blessing
from God--also teach that the primary purpose of woman is to conceive
and bear sons, i.e., "arrows" for God's army.

Consider Romans 1:27: "And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman,
burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that
which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their
error which was meet."

The GOP's adoption of an anti-abortion platform is further indication of a party that has no clue about reproductive life

There's no doubt that Todd Akin's stunningly misguided understanding of female anatomy,
as seen in his claim that raped women can't get pregnant, represented
yet another instance of the Republican party's estrangement from
science. But the GOP's refusal to grapple with facts goes beyond
biology: there's some very basic mathematics that they appear ignorant
of as well.

The polling showing just how unpopular the party's
official anti-abortion position (adopted by the platform committee this
week and identical to the policy that Akin tried to use junk science to
support) is as follows: just 20% of Americans believe abortion should be
"illegal in all circumstances", compared to 25% who say that it should
"always be legal" and the vast majority – 52% – who say that it should
be "legal only under certain circumstances".

You can make the
party's official position compatible with the more moderate view of the
actual Republican candidates only with a kind of magical thinking. This
was well put by the party chairman Reince Priebus
earlier this week: "This is the platform of the Republican party. It's
not the platform of Mitt Romney." Ta da! Pay no attention to the men
behind the curtain. Hey, look: there's Ann!

Ann Romney and 14
other women will speak at the Republican national convention (where the
platform will be officially adopted) – almost half of the full list of
those invited to address the gathering. But those women dress a campaign
stage on which actual female elected officials are outnumbered by men
about 10 to one, a gender gap that probably doesn't alarm Republican
political operatives so much as the equally stark gap that exists in the
polls.

Mitt Romney, who will be officially nominated this week as the
Republican nominee for president, appears to trim his social convictions
to the party’s prevailing winds. There is no doubt, however, about
where the party’s vice-presidential candidate stands. A long history of
social extremism makes Paul Ryan an emblem of the Republican tack to the
far right.

Mr. Romney’s choice of Mr. Ryan carried some risks, considering Mr.
Ryan’s advocacy of overhauling Medicare, but it has sent the strongest
signal of solidarity to those who have made the party unrecognizable to
moderates. Strident conservatives had been uneasy with Mr. Romney, but
it is the rest of the country that should be nervous about
conservatives’ now-enthusiastic acceptance of the Republican ticket.

Mr. Ryan is best known as the face of Republican budget-cutting, though
his ideology runs much deeper. For years, he has been a reliable vote
against workplace equity for women, opposing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair
Pay Act, which makes it easier for women to file wage-discrimination
lawsuits, and two similar measures.

The full outpouring of hard-right enthusiasm is based, to a large
degree, on Mr. Ryan’s sweeping opposition to abortion rights. He has
long wanted to ban access to abortion even in the case of rape, the
ideology espoused in this year’s Republican platform. (Mr. Romney favors
a rape exception.) Mr. Ryan also co-sponsored, along with
Representative Todd Akin of Missouri, a bill that would have narrowed
the definition of rape to reduce the number of poor women who can get an
abortion through Medicaid.

New federal data show more Maine parents are choosing not
to vaccinate their children, a trend that worries health providers as an
outbreak of whooping cough continues to worsen and students prepare to go back to school.

Vaccines
are crucial to sparing both children and adults from whooping cough and
other dangerous and preventable diseases, said Dr. Michael Ross of
Husson Pediatrics in Bangor.

“Lack of their use leads to outbreaks like this,” he said.

Maine has recorded 411 cases
of whooping cough this year, nearly five times the number of cases
reported at this time in 2011. Most cases of the highly contagious
disease have struck children ages 7-19. Within that group, two out of
every 1,000 children ages 7-10 have been diagnosed with whooping cough
in Maine this year.

Whooping
cough, which can spread through the coughing and sneezing of an
infected person, has touched every county in the state. Cumberland,
Somerset, Penobscot and Androscoggin counties have been hit the hardest.

The
rise in Maine mirrors a nationwide trend. Washington state has declared
an epidemic of whooping cough with more than 3,500 cases this year. The
disease has been blamed for 13 deaths in the United States in 2012,
mostly among infants under 3 months old.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson